Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

Researchers in Ottawa, Canada are hoping to ease women’s fear of hormone replacement drugs by creating and testing synthetic hormones to combat aggravating symptoms of menopause, according to Canada.com. The research follows an earlier grant from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation to explore the re-engineering of estrogen estradiol, which is one of the components of the popular hormone replacement therapy (HRT) Premarin. The new grant, funded by a $267,000 research grant from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, seeks to evaluate those compounds of synthesized molecules on the liver, cardiac and other types of cells. The goal is that it must relieve menopausal symptoms while not promoting breast or uterine cancer.

There is a mad dash among pharmaceutical companies worldwide to find a drug that safely treats the symptoms of menopause. Premarin, after all, was the best selling HRT in the U.S. before the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) in 2002 linked HRT to higher incidences of breast cancer, heart attacks and strokes. Since then, the use of HRT has drastically reduced, and similarly, so has the incidence of breast cancer among menopausal women.

Despite the urgency in finding a safer alternative to HRT, experts say it will take at least four years for the synthetic hormones to become available. And it would expensive. Drugs for human use typically cost about $1 billion to develop. The next step would be finding an effective way to communicate to women that the synthetic hormones are actually safe, a tough job considering the bad rap HRT has received since WHI.

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